Move to Islamify Kotel failed — but Unesco will try again

The Palestinians entered Unesco in November 2011, bringing nothing but mayhem.

Like the replacement theology of the early Church supercessionism, the validation of Palestine also seems to require the deletion of the Jewish heritage and the impugning of its narrative. Hence, the obstinacy in refusing recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. The objective is the total deconstruction of the Zionist enterprise.

The German strategist Von Clausewitz saw "diplomacy as war by other means". Today, it is "heritage" as part of a zero-sum conflict.

Hence the rapacious Palestinian appetite at Unesco's World Heritage Committee. Each year, the wish list advances from the Cave of the Patriarchs to Rachel's Tomb, from Bittar (Beitar), to Qumram and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shockingly, this time around, Unesco voted to designate both the Cave of Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb as entirely Muslim sites.

But they also targeted Judaism's Holy of Holies: the Kotel or Western Wall of the Temple.

In July in Bonn, Germany, they began to make their claims on the Buraq Wall - where Muhammed, by tradition, tethered his winged steed, Buraq, on his night flight to heaven.

The claim of the Buraq Wall as the Kotel was launched by a Hamas publication at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, exposed by our centre one month before the Palestinian entry into Unesco. The booklet, in Arabic and English, presents the "Kotel" as a Jewish conspiracy and launches a campaign for the return of the "Buraq Wall" to the embrace of Islam.

This week, at Unesco's Executive Board in Paris, the Palestinians, through the six-member Arab Group, went for the full monty, placing Buraq as part of the Al Aqsa estate.

This week the bid was withdrawn owing to the forthright stand of the Unesco director-general. We won this battle in a continuing war over heritage - game, set and match.

Shimon Samuels is Director for International Relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre

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